"About Enriching+": The Story So Far, and Where Sumitomo Corporation's Official Owned Media Is Heading Next

Since its founding, Sumitomo Corporation has placed the utmost importance on trust as it has developed businesses around the world. As expressed in our corporate message, "Enriching lives and the world," our goal is to create new value by addressing a wide range of social issues and fill the future with true enrichment. To make that happen, employees are working hard on the front lines of our businesses around the world at this very moment. What are those employees thinking about each day? What aspirations drive them as they take on the challenge of addressing social issues? Through their own words, Enriching+ brings you Sumitomo Corporation as it is today: a company taking on new challenges to bring greater enrichment to people and communities around the world. In doing so, we hope to bring you closer to the enrichment Sumitomo Corporation seeks to create and the challenges we are taking on to make it a reality. That is the role of Enriching+, Sumitomo Corporation's official owned media.

For more about the values and principles that guide Sumitomo Corporation, please visit the page below.

How Enriching+ Began

In 2019, to mark the centenary of its founding, Sumitomo Corporation established "Enriching lives and the world" as its corporate message for the next 100 years. At the same time, discussions were taking place within the company. How accurately can we convey what we mean by this corporate message? Is there a limit to what conventional corporate communications can communicate? These discussions eventually led to the idea of creating an owned media platform.
Many of Sumitomo Corporation's businesses have connections to everyday life that aren't immediately apparent, and this can make the company seem distant to readers. Behind those businesses, however, are employees with aspirations of their own, working through one challenge after another while building relationships of trust with the partners alongside whom we create our businesses. Press releases and financial results can't fully capture the human warmth of what happens on the front lines, however. We believed that if we could share these stories one by one through the candid thoughts and experiences of our employees, readers might begin to feel a little closer to Sumitomo Corporation. And so, in October 2023, we launched Sumitomo Corporation's first official owned media as a place to share the company as it really is. We called it Enriching+.

To continue bringing readers an authentic picture of Sumitomo Corporation, we established an in-house Enriching+ editorial team and decided that the team itself would plan and produce all the platform's content. At the heart of the team's approach is a balance between "the reader's perspective" and "what makes Sumitomo Corporation, Sumitomo Corporation." Rather than looking at everything solely from the company's point of view, the team develops ideas with readers in mind, then goes out into the field to uncover the stories behind our businesses. Through articles and videos, we want to offer readers new discoveries and fresh perspectives. That desire has continued to drive the editorial team ever since Enriching+ was launched.

What Enriching+ Has Shared

Since its launch, Enriching+ has explored the reality of Sumitomo Corporation from many different angles. Alongside interviews with employees, we've spoken to people at partner companies with whom we build businesses, members of the Sumitomo Corporation Group and even alumni who have left the company and gone on to pursue careers elsewhere. By looking not only at the Sumitomo Corporation as seen from within, but also at the company as viewed from outside, we've continued to broaden the range of perspectives represented on Enriching+. And because we wanted readers to experience the reality of our business front lines even more vividly, we launched WORLD BIZ+, our documentary video series. Through dynamic footage, WORLD BIZ+ conveys the atmosphere and immediacy of our workplaces in ways that photographs and words alone cannot.

Explore the WORLD BIZ+ series here

On October 2, 2026, Enriching+ marks its third anniversary. We have come this far thanks to you, reading this article now; everyone who has generously given their time for interviews; the many workplaces in Japan and around the world that our editorial team has visited; the employees who have appeared in our content; and all the wonderful encounters and connections we've made along the way. We believe that connections between people create new value. As we look ahead, we'll continue to value our connection with you, our readers, and bring you stories of new challenges emerging from workplaces around the world. We hope you'll continue to follow Enriching+ and see where it takes us next.